MEASURING JUDICIAL ACTIVISM

Measuring Judicial Activism supplies empirical analysis to the widely discussed concept of judicial activism at the United States Supreme Court. Complaints about activist Court decisions are common within contemporary political discourse, but these objections often have little substantive meaning beyond the speaker’s disagreement with particular case outcomes. Frequently debated by legal scholars, judicial activism is shaped by the participants’ ideological perspectives as well as by their subjective views regarding ambiguous constitutional provisions. Although no study can be perfectly objective, Measuring Judicial Activism seeks to move beyond these more subjective debates by conceptualizing activism in non-ideological terms, identifying specific empirical dimensions to the concept, and measuring those dimensions using systematic social scientific techniques. In so doing, the book allows the authors to assess the relative activism of recent justices on the Court.